In air transportation and Traffic Flow Management (TFM) domain an AFP is referred to a strategy for controlling the departure time and route selection of a set of aircraft constrained by en route airspace capacity constraints, e.g., due to severe weather conditions or over capacitated airspace resource. AFPs allow traffic management specialists to define a capacity-constrained en route resource, such as a fix, sector, or arbitrary region of airspace. The AFP is a TFM tool for strategically mitigating en route congestion in the NAS. The traffic management initiatives are often used to meter traffic into the Flow Constrained Area/Flow Evaluation Area (FCA/FEA), which indicate areas of limited capacity.
AFP algorithms provide the aircraft planning to use the limited capacity resource and assign departure times that match the demand of the resource to its predicted capacity. The concept extends airport Ground Delay Program (GDP) and Flow Constrained Area (FCA) procedures. There are multiple advantages in implementing AFP in addition to traditional GDP as a Severe Weather Avoidance Program (SWAP). AFPs are shown to be more effective at reducing en route airspace congestion than GDPs in support of SWAP. Equivalently, AFPs can achieve a desired airspace demand reduction at lower cost than GDPs in support of SWAP.
During recent years, several systems have been developed for managing air traffic inbound to an airport when both the airport itself and its approach routes are subject to adverse weather. In the context of Collaborative Decision Making (CDM), which is the governing philosophy of the air traffic management system of the United States, many additional capabilities were investigated. These methods systematically manage demand at a constrained en route resource by identifying the flights that are expected to use that resource and holding them on the ground until the airborne capacity to deal with them is available. The dynamic rerouting model provides solutions that can be directly fed to some resource allocation algorithm that assigns routes and release times to individual flights or to the airlines that operate them. When adverse weather blocks or severely limits capacity of terminal approach routes, rerouting flights onto other approaches yields substantial benefits by alleviating high ground delays.
Many flight rerouting systems have been developed to alleviate traffic delays in air traffic flow management associated with severe weather conditions. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,606,553 is directed to a method and system for weather problem resolution by automatically deriving a flow of constrained areas from a weather forecast product, generating a candidate flight list including conflict flights predicted to be affected by the flow constraint areas for each conflict flight from the candidate flight list order, generating reroute corridors available, and selecting the best available reroute corridor. Sector workloads are estimated which are affected by rerouting of the conflict flight onto the selected corridor. The corridor is accepted for the conflict flight if sector workloads are below preset limits, or, if the flight would cause the sector workloads to increase beyond the preset workload limits, a check is made for ground delaying the flight, and if found impossible, rejecting the corridor and examining the next available corridor for rerouting the flight.
Other flight control and rerouting systems have also been developed. U.S. Pat. No. 7,248,963 is directed to a method for managing the flow of a plurality of aircraft at an aviation resource, based upon specified data and operational goals pertaining to the aircraft and resource and the control of aircraft arrival fix times at the resource by a system manager. An automated method is provided to manage the flow of a plurality of aircraft into and out of a system or set of system resources.
Although, these known AFP mechanisms all have mechanisms for flight rerouting and schedule management, none of the methods presented in current aviation AFP processes for managing severe weather consider the effect of potential gains in flight management when a coalition of airlines and other flight operators are taken into account. Prior algorithms focus on independent actions of each of the airlines, without regard of exchange opportunities among various airlines. There are great potential benefits for slot-exchange mechanisms in AFPs, in which operators can exchange or compete for CFA arrival slots in an inter-operator time slot exchange marketplace. In contrast to rerouting and rescheduling the flights of a single airline, the dynamic rerouting capability when coalition of airlines are considered results in making rerouting decisions that are better matched to realized weather conditions. Lower total expected delay cost is achieved by evaluating each rerouting decisions for flights considering swapping FCA flight time slots among airlines, and hence exploiting updated information on slot time of participating airlines in the program while making reroute decisions.
Therefore, there is a need to develop a method and system for implementing flight substitution and reroute in a Severe Weather Avoidance Program (SWAP) that includes coalition of participating airlines, which are able to exchange flight time slots in areas of limited capacity. Furthermore, there is a need for methods and systems for traffic flow reroute and flight substitution among multiple airlines to minimize the impact of severe weather on the NAS while avoiding exceeding the available capacity of such sectors. Furthermore, in such a framework, there is a need for evaluating multiple reroute options in order to minimize the impact of severe weather. The system and method should include mechanisms for automatic flight substitution management among multiple airlines and flight operators, as well as an automatic flight rerouting and flight delay management module. In order to determine the best reroute options, there is a need for a method to calculate the benefits and costs for rerouting a flight out of an AFP. Furthermore, in order to automate the cost calculation mechanism there is a need for a method to determine fuel requirements and flight time for the alternative routes. Furthermore, there is a need for an optimization framework which takes the proposed rerouting and flight substitution costs and benefits into account and provides the best flight time and flight reroute options for the airlines in a Severe Weather Avoidance Program.
Therefore, it is clear that an improved air Traffic Flow Management System in an AFP for flight substitution and reroute evaluation is needed. It is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for traffic flow reroute and flight substitution among multiple airlines to minimize the impact of severe weather on NAS, and provide substantial benefit to the aviation industry.